#oneaday Day 837: Nighthawks!

Yesterday's post was out of frustration, so it's only fair that I make today's post one of genuine enthusiasm. Today marks the release of Nighthawks, a new game from The Curiosity Engine and Wadjet Eye Games, and I think you should buy it because it is good. Positive enough for you?

I should probably add at this point that I have not yet played the full version of Nighthawks — it is presently sitting on my PC ready to be started for the first time. But I did play a demo several months back that looked like it would be pretty representative of the full experience, and I came away from that demo thinking "cor blimey, that game was a bit of all right and no mistake, onto the wishlist it goes". I have no reason to believe that things have taken a devastatingly shit turn between that time and now, particularly because Nighthawks has been in development for so long.

Eight years, to be exact; the project began its public-facing life on Kickstarter in 2018. I must confess I only became aware of it a little more recently — I think the aforementioned demo was the first time I'd really stumbled across it in any meaningful way — but like I say, that initial contact was enough for me to get thoroughly interested in the project and want to pick it up immediately on release day. Well, release day is here, and I have made good on my promise: I have bought it, and intend to spend the evening playing it, even though I haven't quite yet finished Ys VIII as I hoped I would have by this point. But no matter. I'm sure I can find a way of juggling these two games without agonising over the decision of which to play each evening. I'm good at that.

(beat)

Anyway, some of you may still be wondering what the fuck this Nighthawks thing actually is. Well, it's a vampire RPG, based around a similar concept to White Wolf's Vampire: The Masquerade franchise, only in this instance there is no Masquerade; the existence of vampires is no longer a secret. Still, the fact that you play a vampire, with all the interesting powers that comes with both your new undeath and your overall background, is a common factor — and with the disappointment that Bloodlines 2 apparently ended up being, there is definitely scope for a good vampire RPG in 2026.

Don't come into this expecting something along the lines of Bloodlines, though; this is primarily a text and dialogue-based game rather than a game where you have a little vampire man that runs around a city, bites people and occasionally indulges in some of the worst first- and/or third-person action ever committed to a gold master. That means it's a very character-centric game, with interactions between your character and the various inhabitants of the city playing a crucial role in how things unfold. To put it another way, its overall approach has a fair amount in common with games like Disco Elysium and Esoteric Ebb, where you are effectively working with the game, which acts as a virtual "game master", to build your story.

The game is written by Richard Cobbett of PC Gamer fame, whose other work actually on games includes titles such as Beyond a Steel Sky and Sunless Sea/Skies. It also features art by Ben Chandler, who has worked on some excellent adventure games in the last few years, and Dave Gilbert of Wadjet Eye Games has acted as producer. There are also some excellent voice actors in the game, including, among others, the inimitable Sally Beaumont (of Old Skies fame) in a "minor but memorable" role, apparently.

As I say, I'm yet to jump into the full game and see how things have turned out, as well as establish factors like how long the game is, but the demo version from a while back made me very excited about this game indeed. As such, I'm really looking forward to sinking my fangs into it after dinner, and I'm sure I'll have much more to say about it in the near future.

Right now, though, it's 7.30pm, I've had dinner, I've emptied and reloaded the dishwasher: it's time. The lights are down low. It's time to enter the nocturnal world of Nighthawks. Maybe you should, too.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

#oneaday Day 836: Torrent of slop

It feels like pretty much every day for the last few months we've seen a story that claims some game or other has been translated for the first time ever, or ported to PC for the first time ever… and I feel like a good nine times out of every ten of these projects that show up, the project ends up being vibecoded slop.

I'm afraid I don't give any credence to the theory that AI development tools "democratise" development of stuff like this. The biggest problem — besides the fact that AI models are all built on stolen data, of course… and the environmental impacts — is, without a doubt, the fact that people using them end up shitting out something that they have absolutely no understanding of. Thus, when a problem arises — and you can bet a problem will arise with something shat out by AI — they have no idea how to fix it.

"Well, just hand it over to someone who knows what they're doing!" you might say. And to that I say, any developer worth their salt will not accept such a project. No-one wants to debug the spaghetti code shat out by a plagiarism robot. Not only will that be a lot of work, much of which wouldn't have needed to happen if the project had been done properly in the first place, but the person fixing the job will end up with their reputation tarnished purely by virtue of having worked on an AI project.

Unfair? Perhaps. But at this point, people have to know that using generative AI is going to attract backlash. People fucking hate it! People would rather not have a thing than have a thing that was pumped out using generative AI tools! And any short-lived kudos you might attain for being the "first" person to do something (except you didn't actually do the thing yourself) will, in short order, absolutely torpedo your reputation. At this point, with all the high-profile cases there have been of backlash against projects that involve generative AI, you would have to be either wilfully ignorant or just outright sticking your fingers in your ears to be unaware of the resistance to all this.

And the thing that sucks is that, for me and numerous others like me, the torrent of vibecoded slop projects has completely destroyed any interest or excitement we might have had for things that should be interesting and exciting. The decomp/recomp scene should be fascinating, and the non-vibecoded examples of these games put out amazing results that can potentially breathe new life into all manner of different games. But I've seen so many announcements that conclude with "…and this was made with Claude" that I'm afraid I just don't give a shit any more. I just do not care. I do not have the time, energy or inclination to sort through everything just to find the few things that have been made with genuine human knowledge and craft. And so I just can't be arsed to keep up with any of this sort of project any more, be they fan translations or decomp/recomp efforts. It's enough of a pain having to resist generative AI bullshit in full-price commercial titles already.

I know pushback against generative AI is repetitive and tedious and annoying, but, frankly, the signs are very much apparent that we haven't been pushing back hard enough. We need to get to a point where even thinking about using generative AI for something like this makes these dorks flush their own heads down the toilet. I'm sick of it. And, if you're reading this, you probably are too.

Still, with any luck the bubble will burst soon, and all of this garbage will go the way of NFTs. I cannot wait. Cannot wait.

Advance notice to any AI boosters already composing an indignant comment: I think I have made my stance on this abundantly clear at this point. If you come in here with any of the usual garbage about "just a tool" and "what about the motor car" or "Amazon Web Services" or "Luddites", you will be banished to the pit of I Never Have To Hear From You Ever Again. You have been warned. Go cry to your precious Claude about it. And it will not care, because it can't. You are going to die alone. And you deserve it.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

#oneaday Day 835: All night long

Remember how yesterday I said a group of friends and I were going to play Big Walk "this afternoon"? Yeah, well, we started in the afternoon, my time… and concluded twelve fucking hours later. I have never, ever had a multiplayer session so long that the batteries in my headset went flat. Until now! (It's also been a very long time since I pulled an all-nighter on a video game, but those are usually solo.)

There are some mild Big Walk spoilers ahead. I will not be sharing complete puzzle solutions, but I may talk a bit about the thought process involved in some of them. You have been warned.

I don't think any of us expected the session to go on for so long, since we were in Big Walk's "postgame". We had partly (and correctly) assumed that the postgame would just involve going around and cleaning up any puzzles we didn't complete as part of the process you go through to "beat" the main game, but we were also aware that we'd discovered a place where there were fifteen empty slots for the "Kong" figurines that are your rewards for completing the various puzzles, and thus there was probably still a fair amount of work to do. We didn't know what the end result of doing said work would be, though.

We should have known, really; in our process of beating the main game, there weren't fifteen puzzles left over. And sure enough, once you get into the postgame, a selection of "purple Kong" puzzles unlock in a part of the map that was previously inaccessible. These mostly take the form of challenges similar to puzzles found elsewhere in the game, but made significantly more difficult and/or time-consuming somehow.

That said, there were also two puzzles from our "main game" leftovers which had left us reasonably stumped, so we had intended to come back to them. Both of those proved to be extremely time-consuming, too, so in retrospect it's no surprise that solving fifteen puzzles in total took twelve hours. We did make up for it with one of the other main game leftover puzzles taking us less than two minutes, though, because our team are now Big Walk pros, apparently.

Some of the most interesting challenges we encountered involved having to split up the party in various ways. One puzzle tasked us with looking through telescopes to find a series of four pedestals, and once there was at least one person at each pedestal, we then had to find a way to synchronise our button presses. Another challenged us to find a specific sound somewhere on the island. Another still involved locating things that we had used in various other puzzles and taking them to another location. In each of these situations, the challenge was communicating over a long distance: the game does have walkie-talkie items, but given you are limited in what you can carry — you can hold one thing in your hands, one on a belt loop (once you've found one) and one on a backpack (likewise), but you cannot access the belt or backpack items yourself — it's not always practical for everyone to carry one of these. And besides, you have to find them first anyway!

We found a way in each instance, though. And it wasn't just the long-distance puzzles that gave us these communication challenges, either. One of the "purple Kong" puzzles required us to figure out how to communicate complex information between two different rooms, when one room could use an intercom but the other could only respond by turning a light on or off. Another tasked us with communicating auditory information between rooms with a completely soundproof barrier between them. Another still tested the limits of how precisely we could verbally communicate visual information.

The one we left for last was a harder version of an earlier "golf" puzzle involving an extremely heavy ball that we had solved earlier in the game. The initial, main game implementation of this puzzle was fairly easy to solve, but the postgame variant involved getting the ball over a significantly longer distance, which required some creative thinking and teamwork. Among the many talents and skills that Big Walk tests, patience is one of the most significant of all of them. In this modern, attention-deficit world, I suspect there will be at least some groups who find the patience and endurance challenges to be some of the most taxing.

Still, the "true" ending was worth it, and I was grateful we didn't have to go through the immensely difficult "finale" of the main game again. That finale was a great experience, but having to do it again after twelve hours would have probably killed me.

One thing I really appreciated about Big Walk as a whole is that it's just an excellently designed game. It's a game which understands that when you're tasking people with confronting some significant, cooperative challenges together, it pays to have a clear, distinct visual language that everyone can learn to understand quickly and easily. Subtly, and without explicitly telling the player at any point, it introduces you to various concepts as you progress through the game — many of which are in the "starter area" — and coming to recognise those different elements of the game and what they mean is a key part of learning to play Big Walk effectively. Communicating your understanding of those elements to the rest of your group is important, too; if you know something but the others don't, it won't help the group as a whole if you keep it to yourself!

Anyway, we successfully completed all of the game — with the only thing (I think) we didn't find in our playthrough being the "shiny paint station". It was very much worth it, and if you have at least one good friend to play it with, I highly encourage you to do so — and to take the time to play it from start to finish. It takes a while, but it's very much a worthwhile activity to spend a few sessions on together. I certainly won't be forgetting our experiences in a hurry.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

#oneaday Day 834: Gaming update

One of the things I was originally thinking about doing with MoeGamer was doing more regular "updates" on what I've been playing recently. I still haven't actually done that — at least partly because I haven't determined a good way to do it; perhaps a weekly "What I've Been Playing" column? — so for now, today, I am going to provide that update in the form of a blog post here. Strap yourself in!

I've had several games on the go recently. My Final Fantasy XI playthrough stalled when Oliver went missing and I haven't picked it up again since that; I've got to a point in that game where it feels quite demanding to play in terms of attention span and patience, and I haven't quite felt up to that yet. That's not a criticism — I think one of the best things about Final Fantasy XI is its depth and complexity — but I do very much have to be in the mood for it. I also have the issue that I finished the bit of the game that I was most interested in playing — the Chains of Promathia expansion — and thus I'm early in Treasures of Aht Urhgan and it hasn't quite "hooked" me in the same way just yet.

I have, however, started a few other games. Probably the "main" one of these I'm playing at the moment is Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana, which I've been meaning to have a look at for pretty much the last ten years. I did start it one evening when we had some friends over, we all got a little tipsy and one of them wanted to see an RPG, but I set it aside after that because I was already playing some other things. This time around, I started over (again) and have been thoroughly enraptured by it; it's an excellent game, with speedy combat and progression, a real, genuine sense of adventure, and a compelling story. It's very long for an Ys game — I'm 40 hours in and only just getting hints that we might be getting towards an ending, but my map exploration rate is only about 75% — but I think it works. "What Ys is" has changed a great deal over the years, and it seems that this one is (quite rightly) regarded as one of the best of the "modern Ys" titles.

I've also been playing Suikoden as part of the HD Remaster collection, and I've been mostly enjoying that. It's another game that I feel like I have to be in the right mood for, although this is less to do with its complexity and more to do with its relatively sedate pace of proceedings. I need to get back to it and finish it, because I was enjoying it a lot (aside from the army battles, which suck) and I would like to see how it ends. I also believe it's quite short, and I'm a good way through it, so it would be nice to cross it off the list sooner rather than later. Perhaps I'll play some of that today.

The next "big game" I have on my radar to play is Wadjet Eye Games' Nighthawks, a text-based RPG which is heavily inspired by (but not licensed from) the White Wolf Vampire: The Masquerade setting — with some notable differences, such as "no Masquerade". I played the demo of this a while back and it looks like being something incredibly special. Beautiful art, excellent voice acting, a well-crafted script with memorable characters — I'm looking forward to giving it a good amount of attention, and almost certainly writing something about it once I've spent some time with it.

I was hoping to get both Ys VIII and Suikoden finished before Nighthawks came out, but I don't think that's going to happen, given that Nighthawks is out early next week. I should be able to polish off at least one of them, though; at the rate I'm going, I think Ys VIII is likely to be down for the count first, but we'll see.

On the non-narrative game front, I have been playing Super Mario Galaxy 2 after really enjoying (and completing) the first one while we were away on holiday. I've also been playing Kirby and the Forgotten Land, which is a game I like a lot, but for some reason find it difficult to focus on for long periods of time.

I think part of the issue with Kirby is that each level has a bunch of optional objectives to complete, and it doesn't reveal them until you've either already done them, made progress on one that has multiple steps, or just completed the level without achieving them. In the latter case, it only reveals one of the optional objectives at a time, so if you have absolutely no idea what they are, it takes up to four playthroughs of a single level to get all the Stuff. This feels a bit like padding, but the game as a whole is so charming (and the levels so relatively quick to play through) that I should probably just get over myself and get on with it. I've actually been doing just that at lunchtimes this week.

Finally, this afternoon a group of friends and I will be playing some Big Walk, which we've been working our way through at the weekends. We finished it a few weeks back, but we're going back in to try and clean up some of the puzzles we didn't complete prior to heading for the ending. It's been a really good time; I was worried that it would be another Blue Prince kind of situation, where a bunch of critics lost their shit over how "good" it supposedly was, but I'd end up hating it, but no; I've been really enjoying it.

Anyway, that's where I am. I think some Ys for a few hours, then Big Walk later. Then tomorrow I'll do some video recording. Sounds like a plan to me!

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

#oneaday Day 833: Things I miss

It is, I suspect, a natural part of growing older that you start to miss things that are no longer a regular part of your life. So I thought I might reflect on that a bit today. In what turned out to be rough chronological order:

I miss my school days. While there are aspects of those days I'd rather not repeat, there were, on the whole, far more fond memories than sad or otherwise upsetting ones. I enjoyed having a sense of structure to my day; I enjoyed learning new things; I enjoyed having a group of friends around me.

I miss being part of musical groups. I miss the satisfaction of being part of something bigger than myself. I miss the inimitable atmosphere and sense of romance that formal performances brought. I miss surprising people with my capabilities, and earning the respect of people who might never have known who I was otherwise.

I miss my sixth form days. They were like school days, but better. I'd just learn the things I was truly interested in, and the rest of the time, I felt like I was spending good times in good company.

I miss sleepovers at friends' houses, keeping one another awake with relentless farting and impressions of The Emperor from Star Wars. I miss parties where the host thought making a Devil's Food Cake would be a good idea with a house full of drunken teenagers.

I miss that one endless-feeling summer when my parents went away and I had the house to myself. I miss having friends over every day to drink heavily and play Final Fantasy VII on the living room TV. I miss arguing with my friend Woody over whether or not my Japanese PlayStation fucked up the timing on Bust-a-Move (turns out it did, sorry Woody). I miss leaving a metronome outside my friend Edd's door because he'd flaked out early and gone to bed while we were playing Frogger on MAME until 3am.

I miss that first year of university, where it felt like there were endless possibilities ahead of us. I miss being part of a group of people who had been thrown together by chance, but who became fast friends. I miss showing up to morning lectures and only once having to leave because I needed to be sick after a heavy night. I miss having things to learn and do, but the freedom to approach them how I saw fit.

I miss the subsequent years of university, which was the first taste most of us had of living somewhere that was imperfect but charming in its own way. I miss piling around a friend's house to play Mario Kart and Perfect Dark multiplayer on his N64. I miss couch-surfing on a nightly basis.

I miss the university Theatre Group, where I initially felt out of place, but after inadvertently displaying my vulnerability one night in Edinburgh, feeling embraced and comforted by people who did, in fact, like and respect me. I miss growing to feel like I was an important part of that group as a whole. I miss exploring a fascinating form of self-expression. I miss truly finding my voice and my sense of humour. I miss learning to be assertive and confident.

I miss the early days of the Internet, which felt like a brave new frontier and an opportunity to connect with like-minded individuals in a way I had never really experienced. I miss those first real attempts to express myself freely, and learning to understand how to express why the things that were important to me resonated so deeply. I miss an age when going online was a time when you could truly be yourself, and didn't have to have your guard up at all times.

I miss playing board games with friends, on evenings where none of us had any real commitments save those we had made to our collective friendship. I miss communal takeaways. I miss that one drunk guy outside the Indian restaurant that one time who warned us that we'd "get our legs lifted" if we went in there. Still no idea what that means.

I miss having friends, whether we were going out and having a raucous, drunken night out or a quiet night in with board or video games. I miss the feeling of sharing my life with others, like we mattered to one another.

I miss a time where not feeling lonely was a normal state of being.

I miss lots of things. But I think I miss that last one the most.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

#oneaday Day 832: Brain empty

I'm having one of those evenings where I don't really know what to write. So I tend to find in these situations the best thing to do is just open up an empty page and let the stream-of-consciousness flow. So that's exactly what I'm going to do.

As a reminder that I am not getting any younger, I have been dealing with some nasty back and knee pain ever since we got back from Center Parcs; as of this evening, I think it is subsiding a little, thankfully, but it's been painful to just stand up for the last couple of days, which has not been at all fun, and which has contributed somewhat to my general grumpiness, along with various other factors.

Still, the weekend is nearly here, and I intend to enjoy it. As I have alluded to previously, I intend to get some recording done for the first time in a while, rebooting my Atari A to Z series and bringing my YouTube channel somewhat "back to basics". The Atari stuff is something I care deeply about, and much of my channel is built on it; it makes sense to return to focusing on it somewhat.

I've already lined up the first few games that I want to cover. All of these are, as it happens, games that I've been meaning to give some attention to for a while, but which I've never got around to for one reason or another. If you're curious, since we're starting from "A" again, the first few will be Astro Chase, Batty Builders and Clowns and Balloons, all of which are games I am very fond of and have good memories of from back in the day. I think they'll make good, fun videos.

I haven't looked at ST stuff yet, but I want to get back to that alongside the 8-bit stuff, as the ST also has a great library of thoroughly interesting games — and its longstanding rival, the Amiga, tends to get all the attention from most retro critics and commentators these days. Just like with the Atari 8-bit stuff, it provides an opportunity for me to do something distinctive with my channel — and something which, in the past, has specifically drawn people to my channel.

So I'm looking forward to that. I'm not sure exactly how much I'll get recorded and edited over the weekend, but certainly the 8-bit games listed above are all fairly straightforward, arcade-style affairs, so should be easy enough to make a video of a reasonable length about. It will be good to get back into a rhythm with these; I've been feeling a bit like I've been somewhat creatively "adrift" so far as YouTube is concerned for a while, so renewing my original focus will hopefully be a solid move — for me, at least, regardless of what my audience ends up thinking.

I have wasted a lot of this evening staring at this blog, though, so I'm going to go and play something fun before I go to bed, now. And would you look at that? I managed to get some words out of my head and onto the page. Amazing what your brain can do when you just wind it up and let it go, isn't it?

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

#oneaday Day 831: Receiving the succ

Today I got sucked off. And by that I mean I had all the wax noisily hoovered out of my ears by a nice lady at Boots.

I'd been dealing with a sporadic issue with my right ear for a while. It started during a holiday a few years back, where Andie and I spent a few days away in Bournemouth. Bournemouth is not far away from where we live, but it is far enough away that it felt like a nice holiday, so we thought we'd just do it. It was nice.

Apart from one day, where I'd spent some time in the pool, got an ear full of water — nothing unusual there, it's happened before — but then, after attempting to empty out the water, my ear was just sort of… stuck. I don't really know exactly what was going in there, but it felt like someone had glued it shut. No amount of wriggling it around, poking it, wanging my hand over it and making farty noises with it and stuffing things into it unblocked it, causing me a not-inconsiderable amount of concern that I might have just suddenly gone deaf.

I had not, in fact, suddenly gone deaf, and the blockage, stickiness, whatever it was, disappeared naturally after a while. But ever since, I have had infrequent episodes of it coming back, usually brought on by sleeping or lying on it. Finally, I decided that I should probably do something about it, and looked into "getting my ears syringed", which is something I knew people had done sometimes, but which didn't sound very pleasant and consequently was something I had been putting off investigating further. (Fun fact: according to Andie, who has had it done in the past, it's actually quite a pleasant experience.)

I discovered during my investigations that one does not simply get one's ears syringed any more. Aside from the fact that apparently you can't just go to your doctor and get it done any more — I increasingly find myself wondering exactly what the police, fire service and medical professionals are actually doing all fucking day these days, with all the things they "don't do any more" — the practice has apparently fallen out of favour, to be replaced with a procedure known as "microsuction". Which is exactly what it sounds like; someone sticks a tube in your ear which sucks really hard, and all the goopy horrible wax comes plopping out a bit at a time.

I went for my initial appointment just before we went away on holiday, and my left ear got cleared out nicely, but my right ear apparently had some hardened, awkwardly positioned wax that was a bit close to my ear drum for the nice lady to go poking and sucking around. As such, she suggested I spend the next week and a bit dribbling olive oil into my ear (it really works, as ridiculous as it sounds) and then come back for the job to get finished. She even only charged me for half the appointment on that first occasion.

Today, I went back for the follow-up appointment, half-expecting the various concoctions I have dribbled into my right ear over the course of the last week and a half to not have had all that much of an effect. But thankfully, they had. And the (different) nice lady who took me through the whole process this time was highly entertaining.

I suspect that she may have been an exorcist in a previous life, because when surveying my lugholes prior to getting the sucking started, she caught herself referring to the "streaks of darkness". Then, while the process was ongoing, she gleefully announced that "the darkness is being released! The darkness is coming!" which I found exceedingly amusing but had to try not to laugh because it's best not to jiggle around too much when someone has a powerful suction device inserted into your head.

Anyway, long story short, all the disgusting goop that was in my ears is now in the revolting receptacle at the base of the machine (bet it's fun emptying that out) and, after the initial temporary mild deafness brought on by the screeching, bubbling sounds of disgusting goop being sucked out of my ears into a machine, hopefully that will prevent any further auditory mischief, at least for the immediate future.

It was £65 for the whole process, which sounds pricy, but the service was helpful, respectful (exorcist-style comments aside) and informative. If you've never had your ears cleaned out by someone who knows what they're doing, I can recommend the experience, particularly if you've ever had a gummed-up weird sticky ear issue like I've had. I am looking forward to (hopefully) not experiencing that again for a while!

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

#oneaday Day 830: Home at last

Well, as predicted that was a massive waste of time. Six hour round trip for a one-hour meeting that was of very little value whatsoever. Never mind, it's done with now, and I can start getting back to normality.

After my mini PC unceremoniously died on me on the first day of our holiday, I was waiting to get home in the hope that hooking it back up to its usual setup would sort things out. It did not, sadly, so I ended up ordering another one. Andie and I suspect that some loose screws inside had just shorted something out — likely on the video circuit — and thus it was just bad luck, really. I had heard something rattling around inside the case for ages and had never gotten around to checking it because it hadn't been a problem; I guess it finally was a problem. Whoops. Oh well.

I was hoping that setting up the new one would be a simple case of whipping out the SSD from the old one and putting it in the new one, but nothing involving computers is ever that simple. Doing this booted to Windows seemingly correctly, but with the computer completely refusing to acknowledge the existence of Wi-Fi and Bluetooth hardware. After several attempts to fix the problem, I just resigned myself to putting the "new" SSD back in and doing a completely fresh start, then transferring my stuff over from the old SSD as required. It's a minor inconvenience, but easy enough to sort out. After the lengthy process that is setting up a fresh install of Windows 11 (and then "debloating" it) I copied my stuff over, installed the important applications and now the thing is — hopefully, anyway — ready to go for work tomorrow.

Computers are really fucking annoying these days. During the setup process for the new machine, I had to go through multiple two-factor authentication steps, several of which completely refused to work using the most convenient methods. The system continually bugs me for a "passkey", which I cannot be arsed with because I fail to see how it is more secure than the existing security measures. (This is not an invitation to "educate" me.) Then I had to download Office, tell it not to register itself automatically using my Hotmail account and instead use my work account… then sign in to my multiple work accounts, each of which asked me for two-factor authentication multiple times for no apparent reason, and finally we were up and running again.

While I acknowledge that some of the above is due to the cloud-based world we live in these days, and all this nonsense allows us to be able to recover our Stuff much more easily when something happens like the situation I've been dealing with… man, it really makes me miss the days of the Atari 8-bit and ST, when you just turn the thing on and load the software you need from a disk. I'm sure attempting to function normally with a setup like that would present its own pain points today, but with the increasingly inhospitable environment of the modern Internet and the far-ranging splattering of sewage that generative AI has covered everything with, I find myself longing for a somewhat simpler implementation of technology.

Unfortunately, with the work I do — and to a lesser extent, with the life I lead — going back to a life where I could run everything from a computer with one megabyte of RAM and no hard drive is an impossibility.

Technology today is more advanced. But is it really better?

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

#oneaday Day 829: The hotel after the holiday

As promised, I am coming to you live from The Broadway Hotel, Letchworth, where I am staying overnight ahead of a Work Thing that I don't think anyone in their right mind is looking forward to.

I am tired, I am grumpy, my back hurts and I just want to be at home in my own bed with my cats, but instead here I am in another hotel room, the same day I returned from holiday, trying to get comfortable on a bed that is weirdly high off the ground.

Still, at least I was fortunate enough to get a room with a bath this time, so I enjoyed a mildly indulgent soak earlier, which was nice. The hotel baths are nicer than our bath at home, so I usually take the opportunity to use them if I have one. Unfortunately not all the rooms have them, so I can never guarantee this will be the case — and the shower-only rooms here appear to have been designed by someone whose understanding of spatial awareness is somewhat different from what one might call "the norm", shall we say.

Also I smelled pretty bad, so I was glad to be able to properly wash off the stench of packing up, going swimming, having lunch, driving home, placating the cats, packing up again then driving for three hours.

Were it not for the last bit, our last official day of holiday would have been very pleasant. We got up in plenty of time to pack up and vacate the lodge ahead of our 10am departure time, but we thought we'd hang around for a little bit before leaving. You're technically allowed to stay until midnight on the day of your departure, you just can't have your accommodation after 10am.

We kicked off our morning of being in limbo between vacating the lodge and leaving the site with a swim. I have been doing a lot of swimming on this holiday, and my aching body today reminded me of this fact, so we took it prettt easy, just having a casual splash around in the main pool, a few times around the slow river and a session in the wave machine.

After that we did something we haven't done before: we thought we'd have a nice meal out at one of the restaurants as a final farewell. We picked Bella Italia, which I know isn't super exciting, but Andie had been working on the assumption that "it's just pasta, which you might as well do at home" until I convinced her to look at the menu and she discovered they do a bunch of other stuff.

Andie had dough balls then a sea bass fillet with veg and buttery potatoes, and I had calamari then a spicy pizza with nduja, roquito sweet chili peppers, red pepper and tomato. It was really good, but I have had humongous farts for the rest of the day. I say "but", when of course I consider this to be a tremendous benefit.

Anyway, the first part of today was a good way to see off our holiday. The latter part has made me grumpy, but I'm trying not to think too hard about that. Tomorrow will be over and done with before I know it, and then hopefully normality can resume.

Oh, and my mini PC was indeed dead dead, so I've had to hastily buy a new one. Fun. That should arrive tomorrow, so aside from not actually having my own computer in the office tomorrow, life should continue with minimal interruptions — and from next weekend, I plan to make a start on my renewed plans for YouTube, so there's that to look forward to.

Anyway, I should probably attempt to sleep amid this cloud of fart gas I currently exist within, so on that note I will bid you a good night.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

#oneaday Day 828: Today is last full day

Dawn of the Final Day, 24 Hours Remain and all that. (Except it's less than 24 hours now by quite a bit, because I'm writing this at 11pm and we go home tomorrow.)

This "re-holiday" has mostly been a success. It's a shame Andie had to be ill for a lot of it and thus spent a lot of her time self-confining herself to the lodgings, but she admitted it was better to be ill in an environment where you have absolutely no commitments or worries than it is to have to stress out over calling in sick to work and all that stuff. I think she's had a mostly good time despite this.

I've definitely had a good time. I've really enjoyed getting out to the pool most days, and we've eaten good food, I finished Super Mario Galaxy (writeup for that coming on MoeGamer at some point in the next week) and generally had a nice relaxing time. I just wish, as I've mentioned a few times already, that I didn't have to come home and then immediately go straight back out again for an unfortunately timed Work Thing that I'm really not all that enthusiastic about. (Nothing to worry about; it's just an HR Thing where they tell us all not to sexually harass one another — not something I'm aware has ever been a problem at our company, but something people apparently need reminding of on a semi-regular basis.)

I'm gutted that I missed the special Evercade Nexus event in London while I was away, but from secondhand reports it sounds like it was a big success. People got to play with Nexii, Banjo-Kazooie, Banjo-Tooie and Doom, and it seems everything went down well. Now we have to get our heads down and get these things released next month. Exciting times. I will be glad to put a lot of the stress of these high-profile releases behind us for the most part — but I hope I'm not spoiling too much by saying that we have some equally challenging but immensely worthwhile stuff coming up next year. Nothing has, of course, been announced just yet, but the wheels are already in motion. You might be surprised quite how much work goes into a lot of these releases!

Anyway, I'm talking work when I'm still on holiday, so I'm going to stop that now. I'm going to have a big indulgent glass of milk, then I'm going to get a relatively early night so we can get up at a sensible hour tomorrow morning (compared to our usual rolling out of bed around lunchtime on non-work days) to have a swim, have a nice lunch and then, reluctantly, head for home.

No, it will be nice to be home (for a few hours, in my case) to see my mother-in-law and the cats, who I'm sure have been getting along famously. We've been checking in on the security cameras every so often, and Oliver has, of course, been incredibly sociable, as he always is, and Patti came out from hiding as quickly as she always does when the Nice Old Lady comes to stay and look after them. They will be fine, but they will be happy to see us, I'm sure, and that's always nice.

Right, on that note, I am going to get that aforementioned indulgent glass of milk and head bedwards. Your next thrilling update on this rollercoaster of a blog will be… probably from a hotel room in sunny Letchworth. So look forward to that, I guess.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.